Author Archives: Niall Cooling

About Niall Cooling

Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.

Test Driven Development (TDD) with the mbed

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Niall Cooling

One of the most useful fallout’s from the acceptance of Agile techniques is the use of Test-Driven-Development (TDD) and the growth of associated test frameworks, such as GoogleTest and CppUTest, etc.

I won’t get into the details of TDD here as they are well covered elsewhere (I recommend James Grenning’s book “Test Driven Development for Embedded C” for a good coverage of the subject area), but the principle is

Write a test
Develop enough code to compile and build (but will fail the test)
Write the application code […]

Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, CMSIS, Cortex, Testing | 4 Comments

Python – The everyman’s language

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Niall Cooling

Python is a very nice language in many respects: enforced white-spacing promotes readability, extensibility and Python’s inbuilt Read-Eval-Print-Loop interpreter combined with its introspection capabilities provides a very easy way to learn and get to grips with the language.

But that can’t be all, can it? Why Python?

One of the reasons behind the success of our course has been customers wanting a good language for developing automated testing scripts and Python fits the bill brilliantly – it’s fast (enough), approachable and has great […]

Posted in General, training | Tagged | 8 Comments

Rehosting ARMCC for the mbed with CMSIS-DAP

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Niall Cooling

In this posting I will look at porting the C standard library output (e.g. puts / printf ) to use a UART rather than the default ARM/Keil semihosting.

In my last post, I looked at getting basic user I/O out from a native-mbed via UART0 to a terminal emulator (e.g. Tera Term). This was driven by the fact that, currently, neither printf (via semihosting) or ITM_SendChar do not function on the mbed. Unfortunately, my solution uses a propriety API, such as init_serial0 and putchar0, […]

Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, CMSIS, Cortex | 3 Comments

User I/O from mbed with CMSIS-DAP

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Niall Cooling

Following on from my last posting regarding using native C/C++ on the mbed I have found that I currently cannot get output via the standard CMSIS ITM_SendChar function as used in the Cortex-M hard fault handler (I am currently in dialog with the guys at ARM trying to resolve this).

In the standard mbed environment, the mbed can communicate with a host PC through a “USB Virtual Serial Port” over the same USB cable that is used for programming using printf(), e.g.

#include “mbed.h”
int […]

Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, CMSIS, Cortex | 3 Comments

Native C/C++ Application development for the mbed using CMSIS-DAP

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Niall Cooling

If you have been following the Feabhas blog for some time, you may remember that in April of last year I posted about my experiences of using the MQTT protocol. The demonstration code was ran the ARM Cortex-M3 based mbed platform.

For those that are not familiar with the mbed, it is an “Arduino-like” development platform for small microcontroller embedded systems. The variant I’m using is built using an NXP LPC1768 Cortex-M3 device, which offers a plethora of connection options, ranging […]

Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, CMSIS, Cortex | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Setting up the Cortex-M3/4 (ARMv7-M) Memory Protection Unit (MPU)

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Niall Cooling

An optional part of the ARMv7-M architecture is the support of a Memory Protection Unit (MPU). This is a fairly simplistic device (compared to a fully blow Memory Management Unit (MMU) as found on the Cortex-A family), but if available can be programmed to help capture illegal or dangerous memory accesses.
When first looking at programming the MPU it may seem rather daunting, but in reality it is very straightforward. The added benefit of the ARMv7-M family is the well-defined memory […]

Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, CMSIS, Cortex, Testing | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments

Developing a Generic Hard Fault handler for ARM Cortex-M3/Cortex-M4

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Niall Cooling

This posting assumes you that you have a working ARM Cortex-M3 base project in Keil uVision. If not, please see the “howto” video: Creating ARM Cortex-M3 CMSIS Base Project in uVision

Divide by zero error

Given the following C function

int div(int lho, int rho)
{
return lho/rho;
}

called from main with these arguments

int main(void)
{
int a = 10;
int b = 0;
int c;
c = div(a, b);
// other code
}

You […]

Posted in ARM, C/C++ Programming, CMSIS, Cortex | Tagged , , , | 24 Comments

Weak linkage in C programming

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Niall Cooling

When linking C programs there are (in general) only a couple of errors you’re likely to see. If, for example, you have two functions in different files, both with external linkage, then the files will compile okay, but when you link you’ll likely see an error along these lines:

linking…
weak_linkage.axf: Error: L6200E: Symbol foo multiply defined (by foo.o and foo2.o).
Target not created

Most of the time this makes sense and is as expected; however there is a particular instance where it gets in the […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming, CMSIS | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

I Dream of a Cheeky Missile Launcher

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Niall Cooling

I read a blog post by Matthias Vallentin a while back about getting a USB missile launcher working and thought that a similar gadget would be a nice candidate for the 2012 refresh of our successful EL503 Developing for Embedded Linux course so ordered a nice looking piece of hardware from Amazon – the Thunder Missile Launcher from Dream Cheeky.

Sadly these guys don’t provide Linux drivers and the hardware wasn’t an exact match for the launcher used in Matthias’ article […]

Posted in C/C++ Programming, General, Testing, training | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Capturing the Stripe-d Flag 2.0 – The After Party

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Niall Cooling

Following on from our previous article looking at Stripe’s Capture the Flag 2.0 challenge, Team Feabhas cracked the last of the levels and its members should hopefully be receiving their complementary t-shirts soon.

It has proven to be a popular article with lots of people coming to the blog for solutions and walk-through, and now that the competition has finished we have decided to share the way we approached each of these levels, their solution and the way in which the […]

Posted in Design Issues, General, Testing | Tagged , , | 2 Comments